Provides access to resources owned by the Claremont Colleges Library, and to millions of resources from libraries worldwide that we do not own. In addition to physical materials housed in the library, Library Search also provides access to online sources (e-books, articles, dissertations, and streaming video and audio).

Types of History Research: Primary VS. Secondary

Your professor may require you to find scholarly sources popular sources, secondary sources or primary sources on your topic. Here's a very basic guide if you need more details:

Primary Sources: Primary sources are the raw stuff of history. Examples of primary sources:

diaries and journals

documents,

newspaper or magazine articles,

statistics,

novels, plays, or poetry

reports, autobiographies, memoirs, or books written during the time of an event

Some Primary Sources are also known as popular sources.

Secondary or Scholarly Sources:

These are the peer reviewed articles and scholarly books that historians write after they have worked with the primary sources -- and consulted other secondary articles or books.

Historiography: Historiography is the study of how historians have interpreted historical events throughout time. The student of the historiography of the English Civil war , for example, might want to compare how historians wrote about that event in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries. . One way of doing this comparative interpretation, is by looking for bibliographies on a subject or using the keyword "historiography" combined with keywords from the subject of your research (such as "English civil war"" in our Library Search or a scholarly database such as Historical Abstracts.)